The American Prospect

A monthly political journal of liberal though. Contains articles that generate debate, further ideas, and set agendas; and provides a forum for working through the controversies and hard choices facing all Americans. Includes regular topics and features.

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Articles from Vol. 23, No. 7, September-October

On July 26, as traders were once again deserting Spain's government bonds, setting up the risk of a default and a deeper crisis of the euro, Mario Draghi, president of the European Central Bank surprised and delighted financial markets. Speaking off...

One morning earlier this year, in the borderland town of Brawley, California, 75-year-old Ignacio Villalobos perched on a chair in his trailer, removed a plastic bag from the well of a rubber boot, and finished dressing for work. Dawn was still an...

You know you're in a fledgling campaign office the moment you step off the street and into one of the plainest buildings in Germantown, a mostly black Philadelphia neighborhood that contains several Colonial landmarks. Along garish, peach-colored walls...

If the magazine you're holding feels different, that's because it is. Wider (by one inch) and thicker (by 24 pages or so) than the Prospect you've been receiving in recent years, it also boasts a new logo and what we hope is an enticing new design....

The Sisters of Saint Joseph are waiting for a bus, glistening ever so slightly as they stand in the near-100-degree heat of a late June afternoon, huddled under a couple of pine trees that border an asphalt parking lot in Langhorne, Pennsylvania. The...

I. THE UNION VANISHES Imagine America without unions. This shouldn't be hard. In much of America unions have already disappeared. In the rest of America they're battling for their lives. Unions have been declining for decades. In the early 1950s,...

On a sticky night in mid-June, the four members of Against Me! walked onstage at Amos' South-end, a narrow, two-story club just past the edge of downtown Charlotte, North Carolina. Three wore some variation on the plain black T-shirt. Laura Jane Grace,...

Although understatement is an attractive quality in most lines of work, politics is different. Framing achievements so as to get timely bragging rights for them is part of the job, if you want to keep it. Since most politicians are only too eager to...

THE END OF MEN AND THE RISE OF WOMEN BY HANNA ROSIN Riverhead Books [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The demise of half of the human species would be bad, and that's one reason the idea of Hanna Rosin's book, The End of Men, sounds so dreadfully...

Of all election outcomes, state legislative races are the likeliest to have a direct impact on the lives of voters. But you wouldn't know it from the national press. The morning after the 2010 elections, Americans woke up to headlines about a Republican...

For the aid workers who found 14-year-old Josseline Jamileth Hernandez Quinteros in the Arizona desert, it is hardest to forget the little things, the beaded bracelet around a tiny wrist, the bright green sneakers, the pink-lined jacket, and the sweatpants...

Politicians and experts typically refer to schools as "failing" if they are filled with low-income children with low test scores. Faced with enormous challenges, such schools may be doing as well as they possibly can, though. African American children...

THE NEW LEVIATHAN: THE STATE VERSUS THE INDIVIDUAL IN THE 21ST CENTURY Encounter Books FUTURE TENSE: THE LESSONS OF CULTURE IN AN AGE OF UPHEAVAL Encounter Books [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In the '80s and '90s,...

When Gore Vidal died a few weeks ago, eulogies quoted his famous observation that "the more money an American accumulates the less interesting he himself becomes." Vidal originally wrote these words in a 1972 essay on Howard Hughes, but who could read...

In early October 2011, Shannon Sherman, a pregnant nurse who was two weeks from her due date, met Elizabeth Warren, though she didn't know it at the time. All Sherman knew was that a friendly woman said hello to her in the ladies' room at the Massachusetts...